Amazon Ads Business Soars Thanks to NFL Thursday Night Football

Amazon beat Wall Street expectations in its latest quarterly earnings report, with its advertising business surging by 18 percent year over year to $17.3 billion.

Overall Amazon net sales was $187.8 billion in the quarter, with net income of $20 billion.

The growth was driven by a strong holiday quarter for retail, AI products at AWS, and string performance at Prime Video, where Thursday Night Football averaged 13.7 million viewers.

In a call with Wall Street analysts Thursday afternoon, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy expanded on the company’s advertising experience over the past year.

“On the streaming video side, we wrapped up our first year of Prime Video Ads. We’re quite pleased with the early progress, and head into this year with momentum,” he said. “We’ve made it easier to do full funnel advertising with us, full funnels from the top of the funnel with broad reach advertising that drives brand awareness to mid funnel responsive ads that let companies specify certain keywords and audiences to attract people to their detailed pages or brand store on Amazon, to bottom of the funnel, where sponsored products help advertisers serve as relevant product ads to customers at the point of purchase.”

Prime Video, of course, turned on ads for all its customers a year ago, giving users the option to pay $3 more per month to opt out.